Of all the industrial applications for ultrasonic testing, material flaw detection is the oldest and the most common. Since the 1940s, the laws of physics that govern the propagation of sound waves through solid materials have been used to detect hidden cracks, voids, porosity and other internal discontinuities in metals, composites, plastics and ceramics. In ultrasonic testing, high-frequency sound waves are reflected from flaws in predictable ways, producing distinctive echo patterns...
The materials selected for use in transmission systems, particularly the gears, play an important role in the reliability and efficiency of racing transmissions. In this month’s article we will take an initial look at those materials. Materials for gears in general can be divided in two categories: metallic and non-metallic. Unsurprisingly, gears in racing transmissions fall into the first group. Although there is ongoing research into the potential uses of composite materials for...
Modern race engines place very harsh demands on valve seats for a number of reasons, all of which are concerned with extracting the absolute maximum from the engine. In comparison to a passenger car engine, as an example, racing seats are expected to deal with a greater amount of heat transfer per unit volume, higher temperatures, greater stresses on valve seating and higher seating velocities. We expect to run thin seat areas in order to improve gas flow characteristics at a given valve...
Metal-matrix composites (MMCs) have suffered from a couple of problems in motorsport. The first is that there have been restrictive regulations banning such materials, either explicitly or via a limit on specific modulus (the ratio of elastic modulus to density). The second barrier to their use in those series that have not already outlawed such materials is cost – below a certain level of budget, there is simply no need for a ban as the financial constraints on competitors means they...
The new era in motorsport of energy recovery from exhaust gases, combined with regenerative braking, will hopefully make our ‘industry’ more attractive to sponsors, who worry about our less-than-exemplary environmental credentials, and to car manufacturers who in recent years have not seen the relevance of some of our engines. For purely electric drives as well as applications where electric hybrid systems are combined with an engine and exploit regenerative braking, there are...